You need to get calories from somewhere, should it be from carbohydrate or fat?

Wednesday, April 05, 2017

Rho zero cells

Well, this post is about rho zero (ρ°) cells. TLDR: It's even more obscure than usual.

This is the basic ETC plus the ATP:ADP antiporter (ANT) and the Pi:H+ symporter (Slc25a3) added:

Most of this is very obvious but it's worth pointing out that ANT exchanges one ATP outwards with 4 negative charges for an ADP inwards which has 3 negative charges. The ADP needs an inorganic phosphate to reform ATP and this Pi carries one negative charge and enters the mitochondria via Slc25a3, facilitated by consuming one proton of the proton gradient. All is hunky dory with electrical balance, accepting some delta psi consumption.

ρ° cells are man made constructs which have no mitochondrial DNA, usually deleted by exposure to ethidium bromide. They live by glycolysis and need supplementary pyruvate and uridine to survive. They have no electron transport chain proteins because they lack core components needed to form complexes I, III, IV and the F0 (membrane) component of their F0F1 ATP synthase.

They do still form "petit" mitochondria. The F1 component of ATP synthase is present and it works. ANT and Slc25a3 are present and functional. There is CoQ, which is permanently reduced because there is nowhere for it to hand its electrons on to... A number of other cellular processes are also blocked, those which need to reduce CoQ to CoQH2 to occur. From

The really strange thing is that ρ° cells have a mitochondrial membrane potential and a proton gradient. This is what happens:

ATP which has been made in the cytoplasm enters the mitochondria via ANT running in reverse. The F1 component of the ATP synthase breaks down the ATP to ADP and Pi. ADP is exchanged outwards via the ANT antiporter and Pi is carried outwards in combination with a proton via the Slc25a3 symporter. This proton flux maintains the proton gradient across the inner mitochondria membrane, all of this process is being powered by glycolytic ATP synthesis.

I became interested in ρ° cells because the are so strange. But there are some practical things they tell us too. There's a venerable mini review here:

They cannot perform reverse electron transport through complex I, because there is no complex I. So no superoxide. Equally, there is none from complex III either. Clearly this has implications for what type of apoptosis they can perform and how they sense oxygen tension but more interestingly you can make ρ° versions of pancreatic beta cells.

These can't secrete insulin.

Back in the 1990s no one was thinking about RET as being essential to insulin secretion but they were pretty sure the process was based around mitochondria as well as needing glycolysis. In pancreatic beta cells glycolysis specifically inputs to the ETC at mtG3Pdh in large amounts, which will generate RET and the superoxide needed for insulin secretion. This occurs in other cells as part of insulin responsiveness, but not to the same degree as in the beta cells.

There are quite a few people working on bacterial batteries. Bugs are used to enrich ores also and I think coal eating bacteria produce most of the methane that comes out of coal deposits. So, quite a lot of energy coming our way when you add in the bacterial contribution to herbivore digestion.

Lovely couple of essays Peter, reading these I get the same feeling as when I listen to a Chopin scherzo or such-like. Virtuoso performance.

Hi Stray, not really fussed with the insulin index, if you are eating high fat, moderate protein and LC the amount of tinkering available is a bit limited. Might matter more if you need more carbs for whatever reason......

Oxidation and phosphorylation are uncoupled in substrate-level phosphorylation (SLP). SLP doesn't require external electron acceptors. p0 cells are lacking some of these external electron acceptors if I understand them correctly.

They seem to produce ATP only by SLP in the cytoplasm. They have no ability to turn the TCA at all, SDH needs CoQ to accept its electrons and all of the CoQ is fully reduced... Adding an alternative oxidase allows the TCA to turn and gets you out of the need for uridine supplementation and also seems to get you out of the need for pyruvate supplementation. Adding an NADH oxidase normalises the redox state of the cell and they then perform pretty well, like a-mitochondrial yeasts running fully on SLP from glycolysis, in this case to lactate which they excrete....

About Me

I am Petro Dobromylskyj, always known as Peter. I'm a vet, trained at the RVC, London University. I was fortunate enough to intercalate a BSc degree in physiology in to my veterinary degree. I was even more fortunate to study under Patrick Wall at UCH, who set me on course to become a veterinary anaesthetist, mostly working on acute pain control. That led to the Certificate then Diploma in Veterinary Anaesthesia and enough publications to allow me to enter the European College of Veterinary Anaesthesia and Analgesia as a de facto founding member. Anaesthesia teaches you a lot. Basic science is combined with the occasional need to act rapidly. Wrong decisions can reward you with catastrophe in seconds. Thinking is mandatory.
I stumbled on to nutrition completely by accident. Once you have been taught to think, it's hard to stop. I think about lots of things. These are some of them.

Organisation (or lack of it)!

The "labels" function on this blog has been used to function as an index and I've tended to group similar subjects together by using labels starting with identical text. If they're numbered within a similar label, start with (1). The archive is predominantly to show the posts I've put up in the last month, if people want to keep track of recent goings on. I might change it to the previous week if I ever get to time to put up enough posts in a week to justify it. That seems to be the best I can do within the limits of this blogging software!